demographics

He had the courage to stand against the mob.

AEI reports that Ben Wattenberg has died. I met him only once but had admired him for years, and it strikes me that he stands as a particularly important figure today. Not for his intellect, though it was keen; or for his energy, though it was abundant. No, what marked Wattenberg foremost was his courage. When the world went crazy around him, Ben Wattenberg found the truth, stood for it, and refused to abdicate his post.

Let me explain. Beginning in 1968, America fell into the grip of a Malthusian demographic mania. It had its roots in historical racism, but commingled with the radical ideals of the sexual revolution, the nascent environmental movement, and then-thriving Marxism. The flashpoint for the hysteria was the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb,which became one of the most influential books of the century. Ehrlich predicted total calamity—hundreds of millions dead because of “overpopulation” within a few years. He proclaimed (among other things) that England would cease to exist by the year 2000.

In response, Ehrlich proposed a number of correctives, some of which were laughable, others of which were horrifying. He wanted to ban the internal combustion engine, for instance. He also wanted to impose punitive taxes on people who had children and advocated that the government take coercive actions, such as drugging the water supply to stunt women’s fertility and reduce the number of children being born.

It sounds crazy now, but this madman was celebrated at every level of society. He was a frequent guest of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show; he was showered with academic prizes; his advice was sought by generals and presidents. Such was the mania of the day.

And against this storm stood Ben Wattenberg. In 1975, at the height of the overpopulation hysteria, Wattenberg began looking at the data and noticed that fertility rates had plummeted across the West and were falling precipitously just about everywhere else, too. He wrote a piece for the New Republic highlighting this research and proposing that the Malthusians had it exactly backwards: Within two generations, the world’s big economic problems were likely to be caused by there being too few people.

Wattenberg expanded this piece to book length in The Birth Dearth in 1987. It stands as a landmark to truth. Where Ehrlich’s work has been thoroughly discredited—not just in the academy, but even by the New York Times!—Wattenberg’s has been vindicated. Totally. Completely.

It takes an uncommon mind to challenge the assumptions of the age in search of the truth. But the fortitude it takes to stand amidst the mob insisting on the truth once you have found it is ever more rare. What a man.

R.I.P., ‘emerging Democratic majority.'

For years, liberal Democrats have haughtily explained to Republicans that the GOP is on the cusp of becoming a permanent minority. Even speaker of the House John Boehner can find himself on the receiving end of lectures by preening leftists. President Barack Obama warned Boehner of the GOP’s impending presidential collapse just two days after the Republican party’s midterm triumph!

Last month The Scrapbook reported on a slightly arcane, but important, change being proposed for the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau; it goes out to 3 million households and is one of the most robust tools we have for gathering demographic data about our country. For unknown reasons, the statisticians running the ACS proposed deleting a question about “number of times married.”

The secret to the Republicans' House majority.

The 2012 national election continues to be a puzzle. Barack Obama won reelection with a solid 51 percent of the vote, and Democrats picked up 2 Senate seats, expanding their majority to 55-45. Yet the House of Representatives remained in Republican control, 234-201, yielding the divided government we have today.

And before you know it, you'll be voting for the GOP.

In 2005, Steve Sailer wrote a cover story for the American Conservative theorizing that the divide between red and blue states was driven in large part by the cost of family formation. Sailer dubbed this the “Dirt Gap” (referring to the price of homes with yards), and his general thesis was that affordable family formation—and the attendant bourgeois life which it enabled—was the source of our political divisions.

This week Russian president Vladimir Putin brought Boyz II Men to Moscow to "hopefully [give] Russian men some inspiration ahead of St. Valentine's Day," according to the Moscow Times. That is, Putin brought the music group to town to encourage love-making, and, he hopes, baby-making to offset Russia's demographic disaster.

The Scrapbook is delighted to announce that our colleague Jonathan V. Last’s brilliant essay, “America’s One-Child Policy,” which appeared in these pages two-and-a-half years ago, has grown into an even more brilliant new book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.

Ross Douthat has gotten himself in trouble for writing about demographics and the latest Pew report on the decline of America’s birth rate. Douthat has the temerity to suggest that having babies is important for public welfare, that Americans aren’t having enough of them, and that the root cause of our birth dearth is a deep cultural transformation: